Digital Sociologist and Social Media Consultant

precarity

There’s a wonderful discussion by Ann Oakley on loc 562-567 of her Father and Daughter, taking the production of the academic c.v. seriously as an autobiographical act: A c.v. is an autobiographical act, a life composed and presented according to certain conventions, a story designed to hide, exaggerate, downplay or […]

Glasgow artist Penny Anderson’s first exhibition in Manchester, in association with the Social Action and Research Foundation, presents work that interrogates the modern fact that we do not remain in a rented home for a life-time, with many tenants having to move house every six months. ‘Let Me Stay’ uses […]

Much deserved Guardian coverage of the weird phenomenon that is the internet cat video festival. What grips me about things like this is not the fact that people are trying to make money from their cats, but rather that many others people are trying and failing to make money from their cats. […]

This looks like a great special issue of tripleC. I’m going to get started on it as soon as I finish this special issue of The Sociological Review on Gender & Creative Labour. I did an interview with the editors of this issue & it left me aware that I’m […]

In a recent monograph published by The Sociological Review, Bridget Conor, Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor edited a collection of papers looking at the significance of gender in the labour relations of the contemporary creative industries. I’m interested in this as part of my Digital Capitalism project because a phenomenon […]

Since I first encountered the notion of a calling, I’ve found it a difficult category to expunge from my thought. It appeals to me greatly on a personal level: it points to the higher dimension to human experience which I believe tends to be ‘flattened out’ in the culture of liberal democracies. […]

I’ve included a screen shot below (HT @Andr_Dim) , in case the advert mysteriously vanishes from the internet. What really disgusts me about this is the shamelessness of the mission statement – this is “an exciting time for Edinburgh Napier University” in which they seek to become an “enterprising and […]

I feel slightly ridiculous about this fact but I’ve spent the last twenty minutes agonising over how to change my e-mail signature. For a long time I’ve had a pretty simple and self-explanatory e-mail signature: e-mail: mark@markcarrigan.net twitter: @mark_carrigan web: www.markcarrigan.net But I’m also in the middle of doing lots of e-mailing as […]

There is a name for those under- and precariously employed, but actively working, academics in today’s society: the para-academic. Para-academics mimic academic practices so they are liberated from the confines of the university. Our work, and our lives, reflect how the idea of a university as a place for knowledge […]

Precariousness is one of the defining experiences of contemporary academic life — particularly, but not exclusively, for younger or ‘career early’ staff (a designation that can now extend for one’s entire ‘career’, given the few opportunities for development or secure employment.) Statistical data about the employment patterns of academics shows […]